Ciarrah's Light

by Lou Hoffmann

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Map

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Characters and Creatures

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Bond Against the Dark

  Chapter One: A Dark Surprise

  Chapter Two: A Ride Through the Stars

  Chapter Three: Hold the Mind to Match the Man

  Chapter Four: She Might Protect You While You Sleep

  Chapter Five: Blood Bond

  Chapter Six: Something Touches Him Dark and Evil

  Chapter Seven: The Condor’s Shield

  Chapter Eight: It’s About Luccan

  PART TWO: Dragon Diplomacy

  Chapter Nine: Diplomacy on a Long Hot Day

  Chapter Ten: You’re a Dragon, Breathe Fire

  Chapter Eleven: I Don’t Know If It Will Be Enough

  Chapter Twelve: Seasick on the Back of a Dragon

  Chapter Thirteen: Like Old Times

  Chapter Fourteen: Song for the Preservation of the World

  Chapter Fifteen: Except My Eyes

  Chapter Sixteen: Magic is a Wonderful Thing

  Chapter Seventeen: It’s All Connected

  Chapter Eighteen: The Shape of the Soul

  Chapter Nineteen: One Crazy World

  PART THREE: Missions and Prophecy

  Chapter Twenty: Elephants in the Room

  Chapter Twenty-One: On Being Drakha

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Echo and the Prime

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Sword, Ciarrah!

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Missions—Reconnaissance and Rescue

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Farewells and Departures

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Eagle Speaker

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Khalisehl’s Shadow

  PART FOUR: Lightning and Ash

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Can You Hear Me? It’s Important

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: If Life Wasn’t Life

  Chapter Thirty: Wraith Warfare

  Chapter Thirty-One: The White

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Not Even a Remnant of Ash

  PART FIVE: Cup of Gold

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Killed His Own Mother, Did He?

  Chapter Thirty-Four: To a Good End

  Exclusive Excerpt

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  Copyright

  Ciarrah’s Light

  By Lou Hoffmann

  The Sun Child Chronicles: Book Three

  Luccan, future Suth Chiell of the Ethran Sunlands, also known as Lucky, has just completed a harrowing quest, but his adventures and hardships are only beginning. There’s little time to rest before his mother’s ghostly specter attacks, drowning Lucky in horrible nightmares that drain his life and nearly kill him. Only through the power of his enchanted obsidian blade, Ciarrah, can Lucky claw his way out of the shadowy visions and back to daylight. But further horrors await him when he wakes up, and his country needs him—their Sun Child—more than ever.

  Unstoppable wraiths—products of an advanced but dying alien world called Terrathia—are attacking, and swords and arrows cannot stop them. Fortunately Ciarrah’s magical light can, and with his dragon-kin uncle Han, his winged horse, a horde of shifters from Earth, and the wizard Thurlock at his back, Lucky faces the enemy, determined to put an end to his mother’s destructive evil once and for all. But will stopping her end the horrors facing his world?

  To my brother, William, who should have been a wizard, or perhaps a dragon.

  Acknowledgments

  AS USUAL, too many people deserve to be thanked. Between limitations of memory and organization, and restrictions on space, I could never thank everyone individually in this paragraph. I hope I’ve managed to otherwise show those I don’t name here that I’m ever grateful for all they do. Still, I’ll make a stab at naming a few notables. Thank you, Anne Regan, Dawn Johnson, and all the expert staff at Harmony Ink Press. Thanks, Catt Ford, for wielding your artistry on my covers. Thanks to beta readers, and to the young reviewers who read the earlier books and encouraged me to keep writing this series. Of course, I have friends and family and they do wonders for me and around me every day. You three grandsons, Andre, Collin, and Brenden, you help me more than you know—thank you. And Jamie, thank you for sharing your love of books and fantasy—enthusiasm is catchy.

  There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.

  —H. P. Lovecraft, The Shunned House

  “There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.”

  —Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

  Characters and Creatures

  (A list of some important players introduced in Book 1 and 2)

  Aedanh: Liliana’s renowned stallion

  Ahrion: a legendary white winged horse

  Baneshieldh: wolf who rules his forest, where magic doesn’t work

  Cairnwights: thin humanoid residents of Ethra’s far north, glacier wolf handlers

  Caveblight: an Ethran animal, single eye, hunts by heat, teeth like a beaver but pointed

  Ciarrah: a magical dagger made of black obsidian

  Dawn cats: large wild felines who hunt at dawn, also called venom cats or death kittens

  Gerania: second in command of Behlishan’s Guard, Zhevi’s mother’s cousin

  Ghriffon: King of the flame eagles

  Glacier wolves: a pack-oriented Ethran canine; large, shaggy, with double rows of teeth

  Guriohl: Morrow’s seventh son, Lucky’s boyfriend, also known as Rio

  Han Rha-Behl Ah’Shieth: Lucky’s uncle, the Wizard’s Left Hand, chief military commander of the Ethran Sunlands, bearer of the Mark of the Sun, telepath

  Hank George: older Earthborn man of the Kotah’neh people; took Lucky in when he was banished to Earth at age 12

  Henry George: nephew of Hank George, last bearer of the Mark of the Others, Sacramento firefighter, California Condor Shifter

  Hoa, Wen, and Olana: Droghona elders

  Isa, the Witch-Mortaine: a witch thoroughly possessed by evil, now deceased

  Koehl: sergeant in Behlishan’s Guard

  K’ormahk: a mighty, winged black stallion

  L’Aria Tira: young girl tied to Lucky by prophecy, only child of Tiro L’Rieve, possessor of River Song magic

  Lemon Martinez: a grumpy gray cat Thurlock and Han found under the Martinez Bridge

  Liliana, The Lady Grace: Lucky’s mother, member of the Sunlands council, chief of the elite cavalry known as Shahna’s Rangers, renowned witch

  Lucky, aka Luccan Elieth Perdhro, Suth Chiell: The Sun Child

  Maizie: a yellow mongrel dog Lucky raised during his time as a homeless teen in California

  Morrow, the Stable Master: an immortal who, with his seven sons, raises horses

  Nahk’tesh: Naht’kah’s eternal consort and her magical opposite, also known as the taker

  Naht’kah: ancestor of all dragons and the Drakha and Droghona, also known as the giver

  Rosishan: Lucky’s aunt, Liliana’s half sister, council member, renowned witch

  Sahlamahn: a blue, ice-breathing dragon

  Sherah: Thurlock’s renowned mare

  Simarrohn: Han’s mare

  Tennehk: a friend of Han

  Thurlock Ol’Karrigh: The Premier Wizard of the Ethran Sunlands

  Tiro L’Rieve: oldest living being in Ethra, only known Ethran shifter, origin of River Song magic

  The Wraith Queen: the wraith of a once living queen;
helps the Ethran dead move on

  Windrunner: an old white horse now known as Windy

  Zhevi: young standard bearer for Shahna’s Rangers during the battle in Black Creek Ravine, Lucky’s friend

  Prologue

  Ciarrah, Black Blade, Ethra

  MY BROTHER Niamh and I were blamed for the storm that beat for four days against the homes and fields of the Drakha. Already many of the people had begun to fear us because, even though Naht’kah was the ancestor of all Drakha, none of the others had learned to don the dragon form and fly. On our twelfth birthday, Niamh and I had shared the meager sweets given us as gifts to mark our year, and then we fled the loneliness we always felt in the settlement. We ran for the hills and there, as dragons—Niamh as red as his flaming hair, me as black as my own unlikely locks—we flew for hours, reveling in the free skies, relishing the joy of it. We dipped and dove and soared, and spoke in our minds all the while, laughing at the people below making signs with their hands to ward off evil as we passed overhead.

  But that night the storm came, its winds flinging destruction at the Drakha far surpassing anything seen before.

  The people—our own cousins and aunts and uncles—came to our mother’s home and dragged us from our beds, where we, like all the others, had been shivering in fear of the sky’s wrath. They drove us out into the storm, believing this way they could appease the gods. We took what shelter we could find among the stones and waited out the fury, hungry and cold. Finally, after four days, the sun rose bright in the sky once more, and though we were afraid, we were still children, and we didn’t understand what the people had done. So we went home.

  We found my mother collecting bruised fruits from the ground. When I greeted her, she let out a cry, gathered Niamh and I under her strong arms, and hurried us back to the house.

  “They mustn’t see you,” she said. “They’ll send you away, if they don’t kill you. I’ve already grieved for you four days, thinking you dashed to pieces in the storm. I can’t bear to lose you again.”

  For all the time it takes the moon to go from full to dark, she hid us inside the house day and night, gathering our food in secret, explaining away her covered windows and her absence from the community as signs of mourning. The others said they shared her sorrow, but none said they were sorry for casting us out into the storm, so she didn’t trust them. That was wise, but in the end it didn’t save us.

  On the darkest night, we begged our mother to let us go out, and convinced her eventually that, with no moon above, we could go unseen into the cover of the pines by the lake in the center of the valley.

  “We’ll return before the sun, Mama,” Niamh said, his adolescent voice cracking as he made the statement into a plea.

  “We promise,” I added.

  “All right. Take some bread and cheese in case your wanderings make you hungry. Niamh, you stay with your sister.” And then, because although he was born first, I was the fierce one—“Ciarrah, you keep your brother safe.”

  I promised I would, and I let her kiss my cheek before we hurried away. I wish still, all these thousands of years later, that I’d lingered in her embrace. Niamh and I stayed in our human form that night, our dragon forms being far too large and showy for secrecy, but as luck would have it, my mother’s sister had gone to the lake for a tryst with one of the hunters, and as we were heading home in the dark before dawn, we stumbled over their sleeping forms.

  Our aunt would have kept our secret, I think, if only because she didn’t want people to gossip about her romance, but the hunter, Kirahn, was bitter because his mother had died the first night of the storm. He was powerful among the Drakha. All told we numbered only hundreds then, and few among us had any magic at all. Kirahn had it in spades, though. He was feared for it, but also revered. He bound us, Niamh and I, in thick ropes so we couldn’t run and in spells we didn’t understand the purpose of. Perhaps he meant them to keep us from changing into dragon form, but if so, he needn’t have bothered. We had never changed except in a spirit of joy, and it didn’t even occur to us to use the ability to escape.

  My mother promised she would find a way to curse the people if we were killed. Some people feared her promise, some feared us, some feared our foremother Naht’kah.

  Our healer, Atara, put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. “Naht’kah’s a dragon, Kirahn. Won’t she be offended if we kill her descendants for being dragons?”

  In the end, instead of killing us, they offered us to Naht’kah as gifts—or perhaps sacrifices. They draped my brother Niamh in amber and clothed me in obsidian and took us to the mouth of the cave where Naht’kah was rumored to dwell. She didn’t come for us by nightfall, and it was cold so high in the mountains, so we went into the cave and slept near the singing stream inside.

  When she discovered us, Naht’kah blazed with anger at what they had done, and for days we were constantly jumping into the rainbow pools to keep out of the way of her suddenly flaming breaths. She calmed after a time and asked us to show her our dragon forms. We transformed, and she joined us, and we flew out under the sun over parts of the land we’d never seen before. When we returned, all of us were astounded to see the stones they had decorated Niamh and I with had become bound in our scales. We were quite beautiful, the two of us, Niamh glittering like the sun and I an obsidian mirror.

  Generations of Drakha were born and died as we lived there with Naht’kah and her consort, Nahk’tesh. Naht’kah took a more active hand in guiding the affairs of the people—she was after all their foremother and she cared deeply that they should survive and live well. Only one family among the Drakha—the Drakhonic line—ever showed signs of the dragon within, and to prevent them from being exiled as I and my brother had been, she cast her magic over them, binding the dragon to the mind instead of the body.

  Naht’kah and Nahk’tesh do not age, but Niamh and I were not immortal, and we aged and aged until we were but frail, wrinkled versions of our human selves. Still, the stones that had become part of us on that first flight with Naht’kah remained bound in our hides, shadows and lights under our human skins.

  A day came when Nahk’tesh dove deep into his pool and came back up with a vision to share, a vision of evil sailing in on a distant horizon of human time. Naht’kah determined that the Drakha would not be defenseless when that time came, and she undertook to change them. They had been wanderers, but now she bound them to the Ol’Karrigh and their country—now called the Sunlands—that they would always have a home for which to fight. It was good, but it wasn’t enough, and she made up her mind to give them a secret power.

  To do this, she asked a gift from Niamh and myself.

  “I would bind you in stone, and you will serve the Drakha,” she said, rather cheerfully.

  She bid us farewell on the night we would have breathed our last mortal breath, laid us in beds of mother of pearl and sang through the night, weaving shells around us. The egg that held Niamh she then ripened in her fire, that his brilliance could stand like the sun against cold darkness. My egg she handed to Nahk’tesh and bid him hold me deep in the depths of his pool where his liquid magenta flames perpetually burned, that I would be the living mirror to the empty lifelessness of Naught.

  In time she took from our eggs a perfect smooth oval of amber and a jagged shard of obsidian and placed them in the keeping of a stone carver, Nat’Kori, a dragon of the Drakhonic line. Nat’Kori grew quite old before he worked us into our present forms. Every day for more than a hundred years he viewed us, held us, spoke to us, until one day he knew that if he was ever to complete our making before he died, he must begin. Day by day he chipped here and there, carving us into daggers, grinding our blades sharp. He slept one night and woke with a vision and, knowing he would be finished after this last task, he adorned our hilts with the twelve-rayed sun.

  We came alive for him, and he smiled as he breathed his last.

  Niamh is silent now, and lost perhaps.

  But I am found and will be b
onded, blood to light. I still sing, and my dark light shines.

  Talon, Speaker of Bastien Clan Eagle Shifters, Earth

  TALON BASTIEN slowed his camouflage jeep enough to safely make the turn from the dry gravel of Sinlahekin Road to the dirt track that would take him to the clan aerie. The day was warm for March in the Okanogan, and he longed for the cool crispness he could find soaring hundreds of feet up in eagle form. He shook his head, refusing the idea, and kept driving.

  More important to get the supplies in, he reminded himself.

  Like most shifters he knew, he looked about half his eighty years, but at the moment he was feeling his age. Not so much in his body, which remained sturdy and stone-shouldered as always, but his heart felt heavier than ever before.

  Why are these troubles hitting us now? he asked himself for what must have been the hundredth time, yet whatever the elusive connection was between the world condition and the aerie’s failing health, he still couldn’t see it.

  He’d led the clan for more than forty years, ever since his father was shot down from a helicopter in an unlawful eagle hunt. That had been the last time the clan had faced a serious threat, what with government agencies mad-dogging every golden eagle, shifter or not, within a hundred miles of the Umatilla, where the clan had made its home for a hundred years or so prior. The teapot-sized storm that blew up when one of the scandal rags published an ill-gotten photo of a teenager in partial shift had eventually blown over, but it had been enough to uproot the clan.

  A few hundred miles north, the Sinlahekin Wildlife Preserve turned out to be a perfect fit for the clan, and with Talon’s degree in ecology, he’d been able to get a job on the preserve’s staff, giving him the perfect excuse to be anywhere on the preserve on foot or in his jeep. Still, right now, he didn’t want questions, so he guided the jeep into hiding behind a low ridge with a convenient space between it and the thicker than usual Douglas firs on the other side, careful not to churn up the ground too much.